Episode 1 HotC

Katie McLean and Alana DeBoer discuss the importance of community care and connection on well-being. They highlight the impact of community on parenting and aging, emphasizing the need for accessible and inclusive community spaces. They explore the barriers to building community and the cultural shift needed to embrace vulnerability and ask for help. They advocate for changes in infrastructure and mindset to make community-building easier and more widespread. Hello and welcome to a brand new podcast on community, Happiness of the Commons. My name is Katie McLean and I'm a registered provisional psychologist in Calgary and I care a lot about the way that community care and community connection impacts our well-being. And my name is Alana DeBoer and I'm a community care advocate and I care a lot about how the structures and systems of our built environment impact our health and well-being. We have known each other for over 20 years and we've kind of reconnected in the last couple years and community is a theme that has come up over and over and over again in our conversations about things we care about, the way that we set our lives up as parents and people and well, community members for lack of a better word. And we want to explore a lot of the nuance around these conversations because in carousels, reels, all these places that these community conversations are happening we find the same things coming up over and over again and in our conversations there's so much more depth to what community is and how it can impact our lives and what it means to us. What do you think about some of the ways that community has positively impacted you? Yeah, there's so many ways that community care has impacted my life especially since I've had children. I feel like there's so many themes that just keep coming up over and over again and it's become really important to me to establish my own little village and some of the ways that I've recently been doing that is by getting involved at my kids' school and then from there it just snowballs. I notice more and more things and spend a lot of time thinking about how I can better support the other people in my life and help them. I feel like parenting without a community is so hard. Yeah, I think being a parent in the 2020s is one of the things that has really highlighted the importance of this conversation for both of us and I think the huge topic that we want to explore is the impact of community on parenting and what it means to be the village, have the village, build the village but also there are so many other areas that impact anyone, whether you have kids or not. I think everybody's craving the connection and the village and togetherness that we really don't have and this has been years and years in the making. I think COVID was maybe part of it but long before that our culture and our society and the way things are built has not actually fostered community and one of the things that's interesting about you, Alana, is that you live in Europe and you've also lived in a structurally different place and you've seen how structures made a difference so I think that's a huge part too of what we want to talk about and explore and it's a huge asset that you have that information, that experience. Yeah, one of the big things that I've noticed since moving back to Calgary is the lack of third places and ways that you can access communities that don't cost money. I feel like in North America we create a lot of things where it's like support local businesses or go and do this thing, join this group and those are great ways to build community. I don't want to say that those aren't good also but we really need those things that don't require you to be an affluent person in order to access them and a lot of this, I come at it, I feel like from a lens of how our infrastructure and how our community, our neighborhoods are built having such a huge effect on how our kids are growing up and even just the level of independence that they are allowed to have or if kids are allowed to exist in public spaces that's for sure a barrier to community and connection and just having the village, right? There are so many places where we feel like we're not even allowed to go as parents which is crazy so I think there's that aspect too of ageism we have an adult-centric society that doesn't allow kids to be involved and also doesn't allow elders to be taken care of and protected and from a positive psychology lens older adults also need community for everything literally for reducing Alzheimer's risk literally for just having joy and happiness into older age community is huge I think it's cool that so many of the conversations we've had already have been around how all of these things are connected it's not just about us as adults it's not just about us as parents it's about all of the people that we could be connecting with and right before this episode actually my neighbor was out front and Alana had her Urban Arrow bike outside and I thought, let's jump out and go have a chat with him because he would love to see your bike and that's just a tiny, stupid example of a way to be in community just literally go talk to your neighbor the fact that we've gone so far from even that is wild we don't want to be inconvenient in those aspects we're uncomfortable people don't even want to borrow a cup of sugar anymore or eggs yeah and funny because we're both quite far from being in that elderly community but it's something that I we obviously have grandparents and elderly parents or aging parents in thinking about what's going to happen to them as they age and then also what's going to happen to me as I age how do I have a great life I'm going to have to work probably in my 60s I still want to have a life after that it's interesting because like I said motherhood has really highlighted this for us in our lives of a transition but when we look back at our history some of the greatest periods of our lives we're living in more walkable areas like living on a university campus or living in Europe that's like when we look at different eras where it wasn't maybe highlighted as much it's like, oh, community was there like even growing up when you're in school there's community aspect to that because you're in the same place with repeated people and there's social activities and groups and whatever and we could be doing better in the school system for sure and you know that as a person with kids in elementary school already but like those things matter and I think we're now in this motherhood era where it's highlighted for us but it will be highlighted in different ways as we age too so we want to explore kind of like all these different parts of the lifespan and how community impacts us and how to be a good community member and be a villager to people in different ways which like I mentioned asking for sugar or asking for aid like that's part of it too it's not just about showing up and giving all the time we also have to learn how to ask for help and ask for community support and that's like a big piece that we want to navigate too talking about like shame and how you know, we don't want people to just randomly show up at our house because our house might be messy but that's like actively closing off connections when we could just be like no, actually we're going to let people in we're going to ask for help we're going to let people see our mess because that's part of also building this culture of care like you're allowed to see me in my brokenness in my messiness and that also gives you permission to be broken and messy so I can show up for you like that's like I think a huge cultural shift that will be will be and if they could be but will be really cool and like yeah we want to be some of the people fostering that and having these conversations is a starting point for some of that to get people thinking a little bit differently about you know, the way they live their lives and is it just the norm? does it have to be the norm? the way that we operate? or are there like things we can change to make things better? yeah with infrastructure and how you design yeah because I think one of the biggest barriers to building your village or your community is that it's hard like it feels hard and it feels like out of your comfort zone and we we just want to stay in our safe little bubble that feels easy like I want to take the path of least resistance and so some of the things that I think about a lot is like for example like we sold our car a couple years one of our cars a couple years ago and bought a cargo bike and that's my main mode of transportation and I get a lot of comments about how that must be so hard and like you're so brave for doing that and like crazy for biking and I do take it to the extreme but like a lot of the reason why we do it is A because like I don't have another choice but I've also like made a lot of systems that make it easy so like our bike is in our garage as if it's a car it like has an easy I have an easy way of charging it it's I have places to lock it up that are safe like I've just taken away all the things that like made it hard and it's like such a habit and sometimes it just takes like that repetition and doing it like everyday for like a month to like change your mindset on it and I was talking about this like recently because you can see in like my cycling data when I decided or like realized that cycling was not the harder option for driving because all of a sudden I went from averaging like 100 or under 100 kilometers to like 400 or under 100 kilometers in the winter per month to like 300 to 400 kilometers in the winter because I just it just like was this like light bulb moment and I think there's so much that cities and neighborhoods and developers and urban planners can do to make some of these things easier for people yeah and I think it's also a really good example of how when you change your lens you see things differently like as a cyclist you notice so much more about road infrastructure than you know what you call car brain people see right like they don't see it because it's like they're in that mode of transformation and they think it's working for them but just because you're norm and you're goji doesn't mean it's like actually the most effective way and I remember too a couple years ago when we were buying this house you said something to me about how you don't like the front garages on houses and how it's like that even itself is a structural thing of like people drive in their garage and they go into their house through the interior door and that's it like you don't ever see people on their front lawn and like certain neighborhoods in Calgary are really like that like you just don't see people outside because they're not outside I grew up in a neighborhood like that that has one of those like typical suburban Calgary two car front garages on the front of it and I remember sometimes as a child sat outside the front of my house but my grandpa thought that was crazy nobody did we never saw our neighbors like we didn't know we only knew our neighbors because we went to school together but we didn't know them because we were like really interacting with them outside of our houses yeah yeah well it's funny because also you can think back to some of our childhood memories that we were talking about earlier of like people having basketball nets on the front of their street and like maybe some people in some neighborhoods still do that but I think like part of the fear is that there are like cars looping around everywhere so you don't want your kids like playing out in the front because it doesn't feel safe so that's you know there's a link there between like cultural choices safety and yeah the other piece around that though that we did want to also explore is the idea of safetyism and there's a lot of good reasons for that but a lot of it is just structural like it's like I say good reasons but reasons that make sense of you don't see kids outside and there's all these stories of people getting the cops called on them when they see a 10 year old out and it's like well actually 10 year olds should be able to run over to Safeway and grab something or whatever and come home like but it's just not a thing and you're so scared of it you never see kids out so then it's just this like cyclical thing where like you can't send your kids out because you're afraid someone's going to call the cops on them and there's no other kids out anyway you're not going down to the baseball dugout and doing a pickup game because there's nobody there but like a grade 1 skill in like the 50s was being able to leave the school on their own and walk home until they're in grade 4 which is 9 or 10 year olds yeah yeah that's so interesting I think even like I'm kind of like a young millennial like I'm right on the edge of geriatrics yeah you're the geriatric millennial but like it's like interesting because I think even in our own childhood there's a bit of a difference because I think that was when I was in like 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